“... by rewriting his letters for publication, a deft editorial feat which transformed whining self-pity into manly resolution. But he could hardly disguise the mutability of his religious allegiances. Educated by Jesuits, he switched to Lutheranism in 1572, when a professorship at Leiden offered him an escape from his troubled homeland. By 1575 he was ...”

“... rather briefly. He interprets Robinson Crusoe as being about the need to learn ‘moderation and self-restraint’ and the art of pursuing ‘ease and safety’. The ‘real crux of Crusoe’s moral sensibility’, Sill says, is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s ...”

“... from that world. He was not a bit like Tolstoy or Turgenev, always immanent in what they wrote, self-creating, self-justifying. He was more like his own hero Pushkin, from whom he drew such inspiration, in the way he could get the most out of his subject, find the right objective scenario for the point to be made. As an ...”

“... and strength of will. Whereas Gertrude Bell (as Ms Goodman observes) very rarely exposes her inner self in her writings, Freya’s great pre-war journeys are essays in self-exposure and self-revelation. It is partly this quality, and its attendant ...”

“... commentary on what was ill-done is revealing in this respect: When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite abandoning the world. Such a couplet as:     Our Euripides, the human,     With his dropping of warm tears, gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous ...”

“... in Capital and Ideology are often framed as the products of decisions and choices. They are self-interested projects, projects that can fail. Piketty’s analysis of an extraordinary range of inequality regimes – from what he calls ‘ternary’ or ‘trifunctional’ societies (feudal, in a broad sense, composed of clergy, warrior/nobility and ...”

“... bears an uncanny resemblance to the narrator – becomes obsessed with the mysteries of European self-fashioning. Over the course of several years, he and the narrator study one another, gazing into mirrors and writing answers to the question ‘Why am I what I am?’ Hoja decides that the Franks’ successes derive from their greater capacity for ...”

“... about solipsism in Tolstoy’s world, ‘the simpleness and naturalness of the great open world of self-conceit which Tolstoy knew so well, the world of War and Peace in which solipsism is in reasonable accord with mutuality’. It is War and Peace, with its epic naturalness and its indebtedness to Pushkinian ‘lightness’ that clearly absorbs Bayley, much ...”

“... example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of the idea of the good, while anti-Platonists invoked long-range calculations of ...”

“... death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What ...”

“... at any point in the composition of the lines. Keats was a Romantic, an artist much concerned with self and selfhood. The sheer beauty of his fair copies seems a revelation, if not a celebration, of what he considers his own best self.At the other end of the spectrum, consider Twombly. Born in Lexington, Virginia in ...”

“... conditions for the uproar over the Gender Recognition Reform Act, which would have brought in self-identification for trans people. It was passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022 but subsequently blocked by Westminster. The bill, which was supported by the large majority of MSPs from all the mainstream parties at Holyrood except the ...”

“... is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for her much, her egoism is as tiresome and her appearance about as unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at ...”

“... he was 21, the excuse for a course he probably would have followed anyway. Having invented a new self, made himself a changeling, he seized on the falsification attending his birth to slam the door of the past behind him for ever. Some years earlier, he had discovered that his mother’s first name was not Lilian, as she had pretended, but Letitia. Perhaps ...”

“... he does a tremendous job: this is a convincing argot for the age in question. The suffering and self-conscious first-person singular manifested in Dyer could be considered a creation of the Gothic novel that came after him, and Dyer can also bring to mind the magus of a time before. But there is no nagging sense of anachronism. How could there be? the novel ...”